Page 22 of Pretend
He was a nervous fucking wreck.
Every time he went to open his mouth, Eric remembered exactly what he had to lose and he couldn’t think straight. The thought of saying or doing anything that would push her away absolutely terrified him. He couldn’t imagine his life without her. He would be absolutely fucking lost without her, which was why he was lying his ass off to her.
Not that he’d been left with much of a choice, Eric reminded himself even as he considered taking his chances and telling her everything, but…
That really wasn’t an option, not when it felt like he was already losing her.
For the past year, he’d told himself that he was imagining things, that she was just avoiding Amber when she went into work early and stayed late, but now, he wasn’t so sure. She’d never been big on PDA, but over the past year, it was like she couldn’t get away from him fast enough. She just…
She was pulling away from him and he had no fucking idea why.
The only thing that he knew was that they needed this trip now more than ever, which meant that he was going to show her exactly what she’d been missing. He was going to take his time and get her to relax so that the only thing that she had to worry about was letting him show her just how much he loved her. There was only one problem with that.
Morgan hated downtime.
Always had even when they were little. While the rest of the children had been more than happy to curl up on their mats during naptime, Morgan snuck in crayons, coloring books, and snacks to pass the time. As they got older, things didn’t change. When the teacher told them to sit quietly in their seats and put their heads down, Morgan broke out her sketchpad and drew anything and everything, not really caring what she drew as long as she was drawing something.
God, he loved watching her draw.
It wasn’t until they were eight and his father took them with him to go look at an old house that needed to be renovated that Morgan found her calling. While his father was going through the house, debating on whether renovating it would be worth it, Morgan stood in what had once been the master suite staring at the old fireplace.
He’d watched the way that Morgan worried her bottom lip between her teeth as she stood there taking in every detail from the cracked marble mantel to the crumbling bricks and everything in between. By the time that they were back in his father’s truck, Morgan was happily sitting with his father’s clipboard on her lap, sketching the fireplace and bringing it back to its former glory.
After that, that’s all Morgan wanted to do. Whenever his father had to go look at old houses, Morgan was there with her sketchpad and a fresh pack of pencils. She drew everything from old tables to entire houses, trying to draw them exactly the way that they used to be and when she couldn’t do them justice, she would ride her bike to the library and spend hours sitting in the corner, pouring over books on architecture, carpentry, and every historical image that she could get her hands on to get ideas for her sketches.
That, of course, led him to sneak into her room so that he could get a look at her sketches, desperate to find something that he could make for her. When he found it, he’d worked his ass off before school, after school, and late into the night, enduring countless splinters, a late-night trip to the emergency room for stitches, and an unfortunate incident that ended with a hammer being thrown through a window in his father’s workshop, but finally, he’d managed to create the ugliest fucking bookcase that he’d ever seen. It had one shelf that was shorter than the others, leaned heavily to one side, had a hole in the bottom shelf where he lost control of the sander, and was coated in two different stains, but he knew that she would love it.
He'd contemplated waiting until morning to give it to her, but…
He hadn’t been able to wait that long.
After wrapping the bookcase in his Spiderman comforter, he loaded it onto his old red wagon, and dragged it across the street. It took an hour, but he’d finally managed to drag it into Morgan’s room, where she took one look at it before crawling out of bed and stacked all her sketchbooks and art supplies on it.
Once she was done, she dragged him downstairs and made the messiest peanut butter and jelly sandwich that he’d ever had. While he’d devoured his midnight snack, Morgan pulled up a chair and started showing him all of her favorite sketches while she explained why they would make the perfect team.
She’d been so fucking adorable that he hadn’t had the heart to tell her that he planned on following in his Uncle Ethan’s footsteps and becoming a doctor. Instead, he’d simply nodded, devoured four more sandwiches and resigned himself to making her a desk so that she didn’t have to use his father’s clipboard to come up with the designs for their new business.
It took a few years, several more trips to the emergency room and a lot of fucked up projects that ended up getting tossed in the scrap pile, but by the time that they were fourteen, they’d had a decent side hustle going. When he wasn’t working for his father and Uncle Jared, he was building the designs that Morgan came up with for bookshelves, desks, bureaus, and tables and selling them to their teachers and their friends’ parents and he’d realized just how much he loved working with his hands. By the time they graduated high school, they had more orders than they could handle and by the time that they were in college, Bradford Remodeling was officially up and running.
They worked around their class schedules, first thing in the morning, late at night, on weekends, and during breaks, until finally, they were forced to make a choice. Instead of going back for their sophomore year, they decided to focus full-time on Bradford Remodeling. Morgan came up with the designs, turning run-down houses into showpieces, but they both put the work in. She helped with the grunt work and the basics and he brought her vision to life.
They both loved what they did, but something changed over the past year and he had no fucking idea what that something was. Whenever Morgan was upset about something, she buried herself in her work, which was always his first clue that he’d fucked up. Since they got on that plane, she’d barely looked up from her sketchpad, which was going to make this difficult, Eric thought as he sat there, debating his next move and-
This was never going to work.
CHAPTER14
Southeastern Massachusetts
The Next Day
This was for the best, Morgan told herself, doing her best to hold it together as the taxi that they’d grabbed from the airport drove them home while the man that had barely said a word to her since he’d told her that it was time to go home sat next to her and-
She was fine.
She had a lot to do, Morgan reminded herself as she found herself staring down at the black wedding band on her finger and-
Everything was going to be fine.
